Drought is perhaps the single most important factor that devastates crop production on the planet every year. Global warming aggravates this kind of natural disasters. Thus, breeding for drought-tolerant crop cultivars has never been as urgent as today. In general there are two ways to enhance drought tolerance of plants, that being, increasing water-absorbing ability or improving water-conservation power of plants.
Plants have evolved sophisticated mechanisms to cope with and adapt to the changing environment. For example, stomata opening/closing of plants is essential for water transpiration and gas exchange that are necessary for photosynthesis and is tightly regulated via multiple pathways to help plants constantly adjust to regular and irregular environmental changes such as light, water, CO2 and pathogens (Melotto et al., 2006) (Shimazaki et al., 2007) (Hashimoto et al., 2006) (Buckley, 2005). Notably, U.S. Pat. No. 6,720,477 provides a method of increasing drought resistance and this is accomplished by overexpressing two 14-3-3 genes from Physcomitrella patens in Arabidopsis thaliana to enhanced drought tolerance.
Thus, it would be advantageous to understand the molecular basis of the regulatory mechanisms to help design strategies to create drought-tolerant and pathogen-resistant crop cultivars through engineering key regulators of stomata functions such that plants' responses to imminent drought stress or bacterial invasion can be pre-programmed and strengthened in a more controllable manner.